Border Classic Singers get ready for first performance

Borders Classic Singers, set up this year with the aim of singing high quality music to a high standard, have their first ever concert in Christ Church, Duns on Sunday, 11 October at 7.

They’re bringing some of Scotland’s best singers to sing with them for a vocal workshop weekend with the leadership of Susan Hamilton, founder of Dunedin Consort, and Alan Fairs, recently of Scottish Opera, which will finish with the concert.

The music is all composed by teenagers – not, admittedly, local lads but Mozart and Schubert! Prodigies both.

The players accompanying the singers include the prodigious young performers which Berwickshire has produced over the past few years such as Ed Keenan and Katie Johnston.

Susan Hamilton will sing a voice concerto that Mozart wrote when he was just 16 – Exsultate Jubilate.

Following that, all the singers will join together for the same composer’s piece, (written in honour of a Duke when Mozart was just eighteen years old), Misericordias Domini

Of course, the piece was mostly written to help him get a job!

The Schubert piece is a setting of the Mass, written exactly two hundred years ago when Schubert was apparently wildly taken with a young girl singer.

All the pieces have an orchestra along with them and this will also play Mozart’s A major symphony, written when he was nineteen, just his twentyninth effort like that and very enjoyable.

The concert is in the pretty little Episcopal church – Christ Church, just along the Grantshouse Road from Newtown Street at 7.00 on Sunday, 11 October. Tickets can be bought in advance at Nairns in Market Square for £11 (children £6) or by phoning 01890 817186.